A Home for Your Song

Once your song is completed, how does it reach an audience?

Indeed, part of the process of even deciding the song is actually done is by connecting with select audiences for a road test.
 
It does depend on where you sit as a songwriter.

If you’re well ensconced in the industry, it may just be a case of slipping it into your live set. Or if you’re fresh to the scene, running a new song at open mic has been a supportive testing ground.
 
However, sometimes people come up with ingenious ways to release material by thinking outside the box. Here are two recent examples.
 
Case Study 1 Take Me Back to Karamea
 
Rachel Hird wrote this song as the result of a particular Songwriting School exercise – one that the class did not enjoy! The idea of setting a rhythm before pitch to come up with a melody and lyric was utterly alien to the students, but they did all complete it, and with quite unexpected results.
 
A tribute to her WW1 veteran grandfather, the lyrics were taken from letters he had written to his sweetheart. Rachel used her home studio to create a track which she had professionally mixed for release plus her notation skills to whip up some sheet music. She set up a Bandcamp page and added a self-published book to the merch page, making quite a ‘family history’ package.
 
However, she timed the release of the material with ANZAC Day (for international readers, this is 25 April – a national holiday for commemoration of the Australian-NZ combined forces getting hammered at Gallipoli).
 
Timing proved to be everything. She was interviewed twice by different announcers on Radio National  - once for the story of her grandfather presented in the book and once where her song, Take Me Back to Karamea, was broadcast nationally. 
 
Case Study 2 Song for the Bad Guys
 
Nick Feint independently released a professionally recorded full-length album, Next Exit to Babylon, in Janaury. He’d crafting both his material and live show over the last couple of years and attended three Songwriting Retreats. But his plans to promote the release were stymied by the pandemic.
 
One of his songs, Song for the Bad Guys, was also a tribute – this time to his father-in-law, a German submariner in WW2.  Nick made contact with the producer of a podcast series on WW2 military history, and his story plus the full song were subsequently incorporated in this episode in February. And there’s more to come!
 
What both these examples show is how music is delivered via different outlets. For independent musicians, providing programmers and media producers with project relevant material can be just the ticket, especially if it lands at the right time.
 
Upstairs for thinking, downstairs for dancing!

best wishes
​Charlotte